Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - The Beths (link)

The Beths are, using a phrase my former roommate taught me this fall, jafas, which derives from the acronym Just Another Fucking Aucklander. (Around one-third of New Zealand’s population lives in the Auckland region). A colleague of mine, also from Auckland, was telling me about the “Midwinter Christmas” dinner parties he and his friends host in July, a time when the season is much more appropriate for a feast of roast ham, yorkshire pudding and candied yams. On Christmas itself, they usually have a family barbecue on the beach.

I was surprised how difficult it was for me, boreal born and bred, to put together the concepts of “Midwinter” and “July”. I googled “midwinter Christmas New Zealand”, thought “wait, no, he said it was in July”, and wrongly corrected my search to “midsummer Christmas”.

There was a bit of Twitter brouhaha in October about a Nature commentary saying that it was “necessary and inclusive” to stop using the words “summer” and “winter” when inviting researchers to events. Many people thought this was a trivial and unnecessary bit of language policing; one person I follow pushed back gently with “I’ve repeatedly seen people fail to take the frame of reference of someone in the global south. It goes beyond just using seasons. It’s a failure of perspective taking, and using unintentionally exclusive language is just a really small part of that.”

X M A S - Faye and The Scrooges (link)

This song has been described by someone I inflicted it upon as “a bit braindead”... but also so irrepressibly festive! Now, please, tell me how to spell Christmas! C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S! X-M-A-S!

Faye and The Scrooges are a somewhat informal affair. This is the only song I’m sending out this year that isn’t available on Spotify (this newsletter remains steadfastly mp3-based!). According to some decade-old sleuthing by a music blogger, the band is “a group of friends who get together and write/record a Christmas song with just enough time to give them to friends at the pub on Christmas eve”. Between 2011 and 2019, they released eight silly, excellent Christmas songs, and not another since. I don’t know why they stopped releasing songs; for all I know, they are still recording one each year, just keeping them off Soundcloud. But I rather like the idea of them doing the project for exactly as long as it was joyful, and then letting it be done.

Robin Sloan’s newsletter recently including some thoughts on finished work:

SNOWSTORM - The Raveonettes (link)

I listened to this song yesterday as my boyfriend drove me through a snowstorm from Ottawa to Toronto. It reminded of Michael Chabon’s essay “Faking It”, perhaps the one I was most affected by in Manhood For Amateurs:

Later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down and through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment―for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret―that I was in way over my head. 

Earlier in the essay, he describes the broader masculine virtue of pretending to know what you’re doing:

otro año+ - Kirnbauer

This song was included on Spotify’s Navidad en México playlist, and I guess its middle verse could sort of be interpreted as being about Christmas gifting, so I’m considering it in scope for this newsletter. What comes to mind for you when you listen through the dreamy, sparse lyrics? 

Lyrics // My translation

Veo las luces cambiar en la ciudad // I see the lights change in the city
Hay robots y tengo que frenar // There are robots, I should pump the brakes
Creo que esto va a empezar // I believe this is about to start

Todos buscan algo para dar // Everyone’s looking for something to give
Que en febrero, ya no vas a usar // That, by February, is already past its use
Tragedia internacional // International tragedy

Y yo ya sé no va a volver // And I already know it won’t return
Ese lugar que un día fue // That place that was before
Sin importar voy a intentar // No matter what, I’m going to try

Es otro año más // It’s another year

It makes me think about artificial intelligence. I don’t know how much of that was that this year was a crossover in my own experience of AI.

Feliz Navidad - Los Straightjackets

Los Straightjackets are an instrumental surf guitar band who perform wearing lucha libre masks. My father recommended their Christmas Songbook to me and I really liked this take on Feliz Navidad. Thinking about felicity and luchadors got me thinking about this graph again:

I found it on the Our World In Data page on global happiness and life satisfaction, in a section on “Culture and life satisfaction”. Self-reported happiness in Latin American countries is higher than you’d expect given their GDP per capita. I forget who I saw speculating about this, but someone else on the internet wondered if this greater happiness is visible in the way that dancing is a more common pastime in LatAm than in CANZUK. 

Make It Jingle - Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Big Freedia

This song is very loosely about asking Santa for an extravagant new car for Christmas, but I think it is mostly an excuse to say vroom vroom and bounce to jingle them keys for Freedia please. It slaps as a dance song, but I’m writing here, not dancing, so I wanted to say a few things about cars.

I see more kids on the street in European cities, and I wonder if it's related to the fact that the cars are smaller and people drive more slowly. (I know the slower, smaller cars made me feel much safer on my bicycle). It pains me that children have so much less freedom to roam than previous generations.

The Season’s Upon Us - Dropkick Murphys

This song reaches its first crescendo with the lines: Some families are messed up, while others are fine, if you think yours is crazy, well, you should see mine.

I write to you from a train cruising into Toronto, on my way from the airport to my mother’s house. If I looked through her bookshelves, I might be able to track down the neon-magenta cover of a Douglas Coupland novel that she used to reference: all families are psychotic. The quote that gives the book its title, in full, is: All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

I don’t think that’s true, but I was talking with a friend about how my boyfriend and I have some very similar assumptions about family, in a way that surely arises from the extreme cultural similarity of our upbringings (white anglo-Canadians with parents who went to graduate school and worked overseas, and with at least one grandparent in possession of a British accent). He said, well, this is also what happens when you like your family.

Kid on Christmas - Madi Diaz

Madi Diaz wrote one of the songs that hit me hardest this year, and this song hits some of the same notes: hopeful but not optimistic, melancholy about the imperfections of one’s life while trying to rally together a positive orientation:

Waking up at 5 AM before the winter sun is coming in
Is it just a stupid wish or could I ever get it back again?
I think I could feel like a kid on Christmas
Looking out the window right on time

It reminds me of a poem that my girlfriend and I have talked about several times this year, which I have copied below in full:

Sleigh Ride - Ella Fitzgerald

The melody of Sleigh Ride was written in the middle of a summer heat wave in 1946 intended as “a musical depiction of the winter season long ago” rather than a Christmas song. The lyrics make no mention of Christmas, but the song (especially the campy and delightful Ronettes version) is one of the most popular Christmas songs in the USA.

This got me wondering about the extent to which sleighs were a common or practical form of transport, and how long ago. I read this article about sleighs, and realised that I had failed to realize that, before cars were widespread, roads were not plowed, and several inches of snow was better for transportation than a dusting of ice and frost. The pre-electrification streetcars of Toronto were horse-drawn sleighs in the winter.

I am really delighted by a bunch of the historical photos I found while looking this up:

Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy) - Duke Ellington

The Nutcracker is apparently responsible for, in addition to banger rat dance tiktoks (links to Twitter instead of Tiktok because such is my distribution of vices), about 40% of the annual revenues of U.S. ballet companies. This 1960 jazz interpretation was composed by Duke Eliington and Billy Strayhorn and formed the basis of a 1996 ballet, The Harlem Nutcracker, which also transposes the plot from 1820s Germany to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. I have not seen the Harlem Nutcracker, but I think I’ve seen The Nutcracker about as many times as I’ve seen any other ballet.

I sat in the Danish Royal Theatre, which hosts their national ballet, earlier this year:

I Want To Come Home For Christmas (SaLaAM ReMi Remix) - Mavin Gaye

Marvin Gaye co-wrote this song in 1972, the year after he released What’s Going On. Here’s what he said about that album, according to Rolling Stone:

In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say.I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.

I think the part of the lyrics that hits me the hardest is:

Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me) (Santa Baby Remix) - LISA

This song is a reworking of LISA’s single Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me), which itself reinterpolates the classic Sixpence None The Richer song. I feel unsure which lyrics are borrowed wholesale, and which have been changed. Kiss Me already has somewhat strange lyrics (beneath the milky twilight?) and my memory of them has been partially overwritten by an expertly produced horror reworking of it called Kiss Me (Kill Me). I strongly recommend the video if you’re okay with descriptions of body horror; there are no jumpscares, and the visual content is mostly animated text on a creepy-looking 1990s computer monitor, with some blood/flesh imagery.

I realized I gave you a lot of visual detail about that video (the horror sits mostly in the plot, so I wouldn’t consider the video spoiled). This is because I am very careful about consuming visual horror content, as it can easily make me permanently more afraid of the dark. At night, I do not quite hallucinate shambling horrors, but they start to feel very probable to me. Surely, if I keep looking at the dark patch on the edge of the streetlight, I will see a person that is too still to be a person standing there, and their head will begin to rotate towards me like an owl’s, revealing exposed flesh and rows of teeth. The shadows are not dripping down the walls, scattering into insectlike vibrating pieces when they hit the floor, but they would. I have some mental subprocess that is always eager to churn out horrors, and after about 1:00am in the morning, if I am sitting alone in the dark, it is difficult to suppress.

I watched horror movies as a kid and teenager, because it seemed kind of stupid to be scared of fake monsters. There is a part of me, even now, that feels like I should learn to not be afraid. When I talk to other people about this, they often agree that horror movies make them more afraid, but starting from quite a low baseline of night horrors.

Jingle Bells Dub - Mato

Welcome back to my annual xmas countdown! To start us off, I offer a wonderfully relaxed dub remix (recomposition? version? I suppose a dub is not really a remix, but an instrumental reworking) by the French DJ Mato. This song got me wondering about where dub came from. I mean, “Jamaica” is an answer I knew, but my internet wanderings have led me to learn a bit more about late 1960s recording technology and sound systems.

“Sound systems” does not refer here to machines, but to mobile disco groups (think: speakers, amplifiers, turntables, DJs) who would compete for crowds by playing exclusive music. Studios would cut exclusive dubplates, soft records made of acetate rather than vinyl, directly with lathes, rather than hydraulically pressing them in large quantities. In the 1960s, when studios began multitrack recording, they also began carving B-sides with just the instrumental track, which became popular possibly by accident:

the instrumental B-side became de rigueur, following a mixing innovation by engineer Byron Smith, which may or may not have been accidental: while mixing down an exclusive acetate for Ruddy Redwood's SRS sound system, Smith removed the vocals, and the resultant raw rhythms proved extremely popular at Ruddy's dances, particularly after U-Roy ad-libbed fluid toasts over them.

Just Like Christmas - Housewife

This song starts off sparse and dreamy, but I like how it builds up, shambly and noisy, starting halfway through at the transition from it wasn’t like Christmas at all to it was just like Christmas. 

I’m writing this after Christmas Day has technically ended in my timezone, headphones tilted so that I can hear the raucous table talk of the people still awake and playing cards in my mum’s living room. Many of the same faces that I’ve seen every December 25 for my entire life, though we don’t look the same as we did. Some old people now missing during the family phone calls, some new people shuffling the decks.

I don’t feel so young; I’m now a little older than my mum was, and a little younger than my dad was, when I was born. I look at family photos and these days I find myself more often imagining myself as the adult than the child. I feel a generational shifting from many directions; friends having children, grandparents dying, layers of incomprehensible slang from people younger than me, chewing on grief and forgiveness, mentoring rather than being mentored.

This Christmas - Pink Sweat$ and Donny Hathaway

This is a delightful and subtle rework of one of my favourite Christmas songs. The unvarnished simple joy of my world is filled with cheer… and you. The way the trumpets blare after and this Christmas will be a very special Christmas for me. Pink Sweat$ said when he was cleared to include Donny Hathaway’s original 1970 vocals on his version, he thought, “how did I ever get so lucky?” and I feel like you can hear him having grateful fun in the harmonies.

This Christmas is a love song, but I like how the lyrics emphasize simple pleasures, how much fun it’s going to be together doing fairly unremarkable Christmas tasks like trimming the tree. Not longing to meet a crush for a kiss under the mistletoe, but hang all the mistletoe / I’m gonna get to know / you better. It evokes companionate love, something described in the Triangular Theory of Love (formulated by Robert Sternberg in 1986, and apparently a “prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love”). The theory posits three components of love: intimacy (liking and feeling connected to someone), passion (desire and physical attraction), and commitment (remaining with someone and moving towards shared goals). These three can be combined in various ways, and companionate love is when you have intimacy and commitment without passion.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Lunar Vacation

Where is home for you?

It’s a complicated question for me and has been for a while. I’ve been somewhat involuntarily nomadic since my US visa application was denied in October. There is a moment of hesitation when a form or customs agent asks which country I live in. I answer “Canada”, partly because my country of citizenship isn’t allowed to get bureaucratically huffy about me living there, partly because Canada remains the default place for me to live, all other things being equal.

They are not equal, so I am preparing to repeat the (please let it not be annual) cycle of moving back to California in January after some time away. I don’t know where I will live next December! It’s probably North America, and it’s probably the SF Bay Area or Toronto or (less likely, but I’m curious about the city) Montreal, but I really don’t know?

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - DMX

I listened to DMX’s X Gon’ Give It To Ya something like a hundred times one spring after being struck by the intensity of its beat in a Deadpool trailer. I hungered for more songs like this, and asked a friend if he could recommend anything like it, and he said, “other DMX songs, maybe”. It’s a unique style. After he died of an overdose in 2021, Hanif Abdurraqib, one of my favourite music writers, tweeted: “DMX was also, plainly, a very good rapper. One who was impossible to push around on a beat. So many of those Swizz tracks were almost designed to overpower rappers, and X would take them apart. Tear them down to the foundation.” 

I guess I write the above to convince you that I’m sharing this song with sincerely, though part of its appeal is the strange contrast of such a rough voice saying Rudolph, the same way Bob Dylan’s The First Noël appeals to me in part because his gravelly voice challenges my idea of what the song is meant to sound like.

At the same time, I notice I have cultivated a music taste where I like just enough rap to feel I have not been unfairly dismissive (and possibly racist) towards the genre, while not really being conversant with it. My friend Sean made the same observation about his own music taste in response to a tangential remark in an old Joseph Heath post, Absent-mindedness as dominance behaviour:

Holiday - Monogem

I enjoy and envy this song’s casually bilingual lyrics. The chorus:

Doesn’t matter what you celebrate y no importa que holiday
Ahora disfrutemos, ahora on a holiday

My mum tells me about how my Armenian grandmother, who spoke five languages before coming to Canada (none of them English), would chat with her multilingual friends, flitting between English, Italian, Armenian, French, and more, depending on which best suited the sentiment they were trying to express. I wish my friends and I were similarly fluid-fluent.

Christmas Calling (Jolly Jones) - Norah Jones

My dad told me that Christmas was one of the only times each year that he’d speak to his grandmother. The family would make a call to England and then wait. This was the era of switchboards, not fibre optics, and there were many more calls trying to reach across the Atlantic Ocean than could be transmitted at one time. Their Christmas call didn’t always get through.

Family calls are still a part of my Christmas traditions. I’m grateful for broadband and video codecs and everything else that lets me watch people across the ocean break into a smile in nearly real time. A video chat on December 25 has been, during some years, the only time I’ve talked to a certain uncle or aunt. This makes me want to have more occasions to muster as excuses to call people. Birthdays, of course, but maybe the equinoxes should also become phone-call holidays for me?

(To be clear, this song is not entirely about phone calls, but the second verse includes I could call you on the phone, instead of feeling all alone this Christmas, which is my second favourite part of the song after the line I wanna be a Jolly Jones, instead of feeling all alone. What a hilarious way to refer to your kinda-sad self! I love it.)

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Kishi Bashi (feat. Finom)

There are a lot of Christmas love songs that emphasize how much they don’t care about the presents… which is very far off from my experience of Christmas as a child. Santa Claus won’t make me happy with a toy on Christmas Day? Absolutely not true when I was five. I would lie in bed at my grandparents’ house, clenched with excitement, hoping I’d hear Santa arriving with my presents.

Why was this? I reflected a bit on childish impatience and acquisitiveness, but spent more time thinking about how children have so little control over whether they get the things they want. My parents were very interested in giving their children autonomy, and I think I had a relatively generous amount of it, but I still mostly didn’t decide what I ate, or where I went, or what stuff I owned.

I don’t have enough money to buy myself literally all the toys I want, but did buy myself toys (well, okay, one Spider-Punk action figure) and art supplies and books and new clothes this year, in greater quantities than I ever acquired new things as a child (except! at Christmas).This morning I ate some chocolate and nobody even noticed how much. I could order myself a Scott Pilgrim action figure today and no one else would need to know. For the most part, kids only get new things when an adult buys them a gift.

Patapan - Emma Wallace

This is an English version of a traditional French carol in the mode of Little Drummer Boy, a story of simple instruments brought to celebrate the baby Jesus. Wikipedia has multiple versions of the lyrics, though I think these lyrics are nicer than any of them? There are particular smooth rhymes (all the revel and the din, from without and within, with the humming violin, we shall welcome Christmas in) and all of the religious imagery has been replaced instead with secular winter scenery, circles around hearths and frosty windowpanes.

I was singing this song yesterday (... when I was supposed to send it out, oops) around my girlfriend Samira, who joined in with completely different lyrics that she’d learned in choir. “Well, seems like a folk song,” she said, when our disjointedness broke off the tune. I do like this feature of folk music; most of the singing I’ve done in my adult life is rather slapdash song circles in the mode of Rise Up Singing or the monthly San Francisco chantey sing. There are a few songs in my repertoire that I learned around campfires as a tall ship teen without ever seeing the lyrics written down, and I absolutely do not sing them the same way as people who learned them from a different songbook or oral tradition. But isn’t it wonderful the way oral tradition gives the music freedom to evolve?

Which also makes me think of this line in the song: come be merry while you play, let us make our Christmas gay. Now, the French lyrics on Wikipedia say Au son de ces instruments, je dirai Noël gaîment, but Emma Wallace released this song in 2019, and she was clearly willing to rewrite many of the lyrics, but she chose to end the song on a repeated let us make our Christmas gay, which, uh, the 2019 meaning is not the same as the 1720 meaning. See this very clear graph from a 2011 paper, “Understanding Semantic Change of Words Over Centuries”, which annotated the Topics-Over-Time associated with 5-word clusters that contained “gay”, and, well:

White Christmas - Kaskade

Kaskade is a world-famous DJ who has received multiple grammy awards, and this year he released a second album of Christmas electronica. I’ve written several times before about his approach: “The songs are electronic, they’re dance music, but they’re also solemn and precise and so unironic as to be... almost courteous?”

Thinking about how much I like this song got me thinking about a John Green video that my friend Alex sent me, titled COMMIT TO THE BIT. What does this mean? John gives several examples of what comes to mind when he thinks of stellar commitment to the bit. YouTuber Jonathan Mann releasing a Song A Day for more than 14 years. Marina Abramović and her partner meeting in the middle of the Great Wall of China, after each walking over 2000 km from opposite ends, and, he says:

I think of the Reddit user who in 2012 wrote, "Your momma so lazy" and then returned in 2021 to write, "She took 9 years to finish this joke".

A Christmas Long Ago (Jingle, Jingle) - The Echelons

This song came into my life through Doo Wop Christmas, a Rhino Records compilation CD released the year I was born. I inherited much of my taste in Christmas music from my dad, as well as my bizarrely strict personal rule not to listen to any Christmas songs before December 1. I remember listening to some of these songs recently with him, and my dad said, “I bet you don’t know too many people who listen to doo wop, do ya?” It’s true, I don’t! It’s a dated sound, one that few people are recording these days*, and one that I love. 

There are two poems about inheritance and aging and the passing-on of people and habits and things that I keep thinking of this year. When I look at the books and socks and shirts my Nana gave me before she died, one of which I’m wearing right now, I think of all the poetry she carefully piled up for in a corner of her shelf, and her bin of neatly folded clothing that was a little too nice to hand off to the charity shop before her granddaughters had a chance to try them on, and I think of the poem “I Dare You” by Doiranne Laux. I tried to find a nice bit of excerpt, but, damn it, I love the whole thing, so I’ve copied in all of it:

What Will Santa Claus Say (When He Finds Everybody Swingin’?) - Louis Prima and his New Orleans Gang

I like this song, which I’m sending today because I’m in New Orleans right now, where both Louis Prima and his musical genre were born.

Why did jazz originate here in the 1890s? Apparently it was a mixture of local African-American rhythms (such as drumming traditions developed by slaves and the call-and-response tunes of the Black Masking Indians of Mardi Gras), new dance genres that emerged from the proliferation of brass brands around the USA after the civil war, and new segregation laws that discriminated against Creoles of colour (which brought together Black and Creole musicians). 

Louis Prima grew up in Tremé, a New Orleans neighbourhood that was one of the first places in the South that free Black people could buy property. Prima got interested in jazz after listening to the sounds that spilled into the street from Tremé’s many integrated Italian- and African-American nightclubs. He started his first jazz band in 1924, when he was just 13. During the Great Depression, Prima went to New York City to work at a club called Leon and Eddie’s, which refused to hire him because the owner, upon meeting him, thought he was Black (his parents were Sicilian). He eventually found work in New York City and recorded his first songs (including this one in 1936. You might be familiar with his voice from the Disney Movie The Jungle Book; he plays King Louie! (Apparently Disney considered Louis Armstrong for the role, but thought better of casting a Black man as an ape.)

Driving Home for Christmas - Sugarcane feat. Molly Graham

This is a fun bossa-nova-ish take on Driving Home for Christmas, which is a modern Christmas classic… in a few European countries. As of this writing, Chris Rea’s original is #4 on the German singles chart, and #22 in the UK, its country of origin. I like that December’s inescapable grocery-store soundtrack differs between countries, but I find it a bit funny that a song about driving is significantly more popular in Europe?

I was living in Paris last year, and my first time returning to North America to visit, I was struck by how much time I spent in cars. A fact that seems sort of unreal to me is I only rode in a car in France twice in the nine months I lived there. (This seems so unrealistic, writing to you from my native side of the Atlantic, that I looked through my rideshare app history to make sure I wasn’t forgetting any.) I came back to North America and going places suddenly involved driving*.

I have a lot of memories of sitting in the back of a car around Christmastime, anticipating a few nights with my grandparents in Kitchener, gazing out the window and waiting to see the smiling Schneiders Sign that meant we were getting near their house. I wonder if that will become a generational thing; it seems impossible to imagine that the TTC and GO could lay down enough tracks that going places no longer involves driving… but maybe that’s too unambitious? I look at this Twitter thread of Barcelona superblocks and the “after” photos feel like they must be AI-generated, or overoptimistic architectural renders, but they’re pictures of a real city. 

Parfait Noël - Coeur de Pirate

Welcome back to xmas countdown! We’re starting off with a song that, instrumentally, could be a gooey holiday romance, but, lyrically, offers extravagant seasonal viciousness:

Et pour Noël, je voudrais couper le fond de tes bas
Laisser l’eau geler et faire une patinoire chez toi

Which translates roughly to: "For Christmas, I’d like to cut the bottom off your stocking, then let the water freeze and make your house into a skating rink". Which leads into the chorus:

Grinch' - SwuM

Here We Come A-Caroling - Pomplamoose

This song is an adaptation of Here We Come A-Wassailing that removes some of the awkward class dynamics in the original lyrics, which originate in an English peasant tradition of door-to-door trading of well-wishes for food that apparently “could border on home invasion”. In this version we hear less “bring us out your mouldy cheese” and “while you’re sitting by the fire, pray think of us poor children” and more:

May we all remember as we go from door to door
To be a friendly neighbour
To care and offer more
Love and joy

I’m a big fan of wishing people love and joy! The only meditation practice I do with anything approaching regularity is a kind of metta, sitting and wishing love and joy to increasingly distant beings, moving out from my closest people and settling on those I struggle to cultivate sympathy for, insects or enemies, then moving back in to eventually wish the same wellness for myself. Honestly, it just feels really nice to wish others well.

New Snow - Sunturns

Sunturns are “a Norwegian super-group devoted to Christmas”. This song is their offering for 2022; it looks back upon the past few pandemic years, lonely and awful as they were, and then, hopeful and fragile, turns towards the next few. I think it’s beautiful.

I’ve been hitting these blue notes
Now there’s puke in the new snow
I’ve been feeling so down low
These past few years.

A friend said he was starting to understand the bawdy triviality of the jazz age decadence. After the first world war killed around 1% of the allied and 5% of the central powers, and then the 1918 influenza pandemic swept in to kill another 1-2% of everyone? "Oh, god, they all just wanted to forget".

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas [Auxjack Remix] - Ella Fitzgerald

There a few rules for the music that appears in the newsletter: I only send out songs that I like, I don’t repeat any songs already sent in previous years, and I don’t repeat a particular artist (e.g. Sharon Jones) or carol (e.g. Jingle Bells) in a single year.

Does this song break the rules? It’s a remix of a song that appears on Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas, which is the same 1960 album on which you’ll find Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, which I shared four days ago. Do you remember the mid-aughts debates about “remix culture”? You can get a sense them reading David Byrne’s notes on the Creative Commons CD he put together for Wired Magazine in 2004:

Silver Bells - quinnie

I’ve referred to Silver Bells in a previous countdown as “sort of the classic urban Christmas song” and I stand by that characterization. I’m not quite convinced by this version’s delivery of the opening city sidewalks, busy sidewalks, sung by a musician best known for her (delightful) female-gaze-centred tiktok hit, but I love her sidewalk-shuffling rhythm and music box chimes.

I will miss Parisian street corners, not only because the buildings that define them are so casually, generously beautiful, but because the city is oriented towards the street in a way that gives it great liveliness.  Traffic is terrible, so people bring their groceries home in wheeled trolleys. With meme-worthy zeal, Anne Hidalgo is rapidly reclaiming space for cyclists and pedestrians in central Paris. But also, Parisians have lived in small apartments for generations, so people are used to seeing each other in terraces and parks and other open spaces.

Unfamiliar patterns of street life feel like a rather shallow thing to expect to miss about a place; easy to observe without speaking to anyone or going anywhere in particular. The local patterns of traffic are often one of the first things I notice in a new city. Do people jaywalk here? Will any turning cars or speeding e-scooters cut me off at the crosswalk? How do people pass each other, in these bustling streets?

Home To You (This Christmas) - Sigrid

Sigrid originally wrote this without any Christmas references, but said that “it’s about my hometown and the house I grew up in with my family. I always go back for Christmas, so it felt natural to make a Christmas version.” She’s made also made a lovely little website to accompany this version:

Home To You is a love letter to my hometown. After so much time apart from the places we love the last couple of years, I want to celebrate the places that mean home to you. Tell me where home is for you at Christmas time and have your city featured on the map.

At the time of this writing, the map allows you to click through "3104 meanings of home shared", snippets like "Åsgårdstrand: a place where i can go to gather my thougts", "Hong kong: everything" and "Enschede: my roommates".

Un Noël perdu dans Paris - Pierre Lapointe

I lived in the 18th arrondissement of Paris for most of 2022, and this song feels apropos: a Christmas lost in Paris, searching for signs of you.

In last year’s countdown, I wrote about applying for a French visa out of a sense of aimless optionality. One of the things I found difficult, in my third year of grieving the person I’d hoped to spend my life with, was that I couldn’t wholeheartedly invest in new relationships or community. “I think there will come a time when I have grown so used to that loss that I’m ready to throw myself into constructing a new life,” I wrote, “But not yet.”

And, if I wasn’t ready to construct a new life, why not explore someplace other than my hometown? Better still if it would allow me to improve my French and enjoy the comforts of a city where 94% of people live within a 5-minute walk of a boulangerie.

Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! - Ella Fitzgerald

I write this from beside a warm wood stove, from which this cozy song ― the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful ― feels particularly relevant. I enjoy a fireplace, but with more internal conflict than I did a few years ago.

During a particularly bad forest fire season in 2020, my roommate in California bought an air quality monitor, and I was quite shocked that, on the graphs it produced, I could see that actions like “frying some dumplings” and “blowing out a candle” absolutely filled our apartment’s air with particulate matter. And, quoting The Fireplace Delusion: 

The reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.

Winter Wonderland - Goldfrapp

This version of Winter Wonderland feels colder than most arrangements, in a remote and sparkling way that sounds like a bright subzero day.

Glistening snow is indeed a beautiful sight― one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen was a lightless section of an Ontario cave, which, when I swept my headlamp into its depths, revealed itself via sudden glittering refraction to be lined with ice crystals. The flashing crystals were so sharply geometric that it was hard to believe they were made of water, but one melted when I touched it. (My disbelief was quite unscientific; geologically, ice is as much a mineral as quartz.)

I’m staying with my grandparents in Wales right now, and the wetter climate has combined with a cold snap to generate crystalline hoarfrost along their town’s branches and blades of grass.

Santa Tell Me - Campsite Dream

I love the concept of this song: if Santa has omniscient knowledge of if you’ve been bad or good, presumably he also knows whether your boyfriend’s love is real? (The Ariana Grande version is a little too smooth for my taste, but this tropical house cover is short and sweet.)

The oracular surveillance aspect of Santa Claus mythology is a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure how global this part of the story is, but it’s not terribly recent; when Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town became a hit on US radio in 1934, it already included the lyric he sees you when you’re sleeping. Newer versions tend to omit the verse more connected to the song’s Great Depression origins, which entreats people to give to their neighbours:

We’ve gotta dig deep and cover the list, gotta see that nobody is missed…
Let’s keep the home fires burning, let’s give without a pause
Let’s prove to those less fortunate that there is a Santa Claus.

Home Alone, Too - The Staves

Here’s something I love about holidays and traditions: you do nearly the same thing, year after year, and it has a way of helping you notice recent differences in yourself. Last Christmas my mum gave me Sasha Sagan’s For Small Creatures Such As We, a book I felt immediate kinship with. One quote:

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. There is so much change in this universe, so many entrances and exits, and ways to mark them… each one astonishing in its own way.

The changes that I need help processing are not always pleasant. Ritual repetition throws into relief the people who are missing from my life, most especially Zach, who remains, across my adult years thus far, the person I knew best and was best known by. This song is about wondering about the parallel life of somebody you used to know:

Someday at Christmas - Lizzo

Lizzo said that she chose to cover this song “not just because it’s a classic, but because it’s a reminder to us that almost 60 years later, we are still fighting for peace, compassion, and equality”. Sometimes 1960s lyrics calling for peace and love feel a bit dated to me, a wish that seems too simple to overlay onto modern geopolitics. But I ought not to deride the wish; I write to you from Paris, where it snowed last night and we are having the opposite of a warm December, and war has people worried that it will get very dark and cold indeed.

Friends in North America have asked me about what the European energy crisis is like; I don’t know to what extent we’re having one, at least in France? People are definitely talking about it, but when I checked the electricity map just now, France was only using gas for 12% of its energy (62% was nuclear). Macron gave a typically testy interview last week where he rebukes public electricity companies, telling them to (pardon my translation):

Do their jobs and provide electricity… not start making people afraid with absurd scenarios like we’ve heard over the past few hours. Stop à tout ça ! We are a big country, with an excellent energy model, and we’ll hold on through the winter despite the war. And so I ask everyone to do their jobs.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Takénobu

I love swift little layers of cello like this; there’s something about the resonance of a bow drawn under gentle sudden notes that gets me immediately bought into an arrangement. This is a new arrangement of quite an old carol. On archive.org you can, delightfully, read a cranky broadside from 1824 about how “in London, excepting some croaking ballad-singer bawling out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen,’ or a like doggrel, nothing in the shape of Carols is heard”.

Given its age, it’s perhaps not surprising that the lyrics are quite religious. I notice my atheist’s attention settling more on tidings of comfort and joy than satan’s power and might. There are some aspects of faith that I find appealing; when I first read the opening line of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of in a newspaper, I immediately cut it out for a collage: I don’t believe in god, but I miss Him. It seems rather nice to believe in cosmic justice, and an omniscient power enforcing it.

Every Year So Different - Cornershop & TRWBADOR

As usual, a relaxed song for Christmas day. This one reminds me of why I love holiday traditions so much: 

It’s the same every year, but every year’s so different

World of Love - Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

If I had one wish for Christmas this year
There'd be no more sorrow, there'd be no pain or tears,
If it was up to me, darling, I would build you a world of love

If you could rebuild the world, would there be no more sorrow? I think there is far too much pain in the world, but wouldn’t it be a little dull if there were no pain or tears whatsoever?

One of my favourite blogs of 2021 recently put out a post on Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly. The author’s theory is that utopias sound dull, homogeneous and alien. Dull because there isn’t as much room for overcoming challenges and conflict. Homogeneous because many utopias apply a specific lifestyle to everyone in society. Alien because:

Maybe Next Year - Jenny Owen Youngs

A song about missing someone at Christmas. The opening piano chords made me think this would be a real downer, but the mood is more one of wistful melancholy:

easy to let you go most of the time
the ache in my chest has been slipping my mind
see on the screen it’s a wonderful life

THANK YOU MARIAH - Kaleena Zanders

You might expect me to get excited when grocery stores start playing Christmas music over their tinny speakers, but though I am, obviously, something of a Christmas music enthusiast, I find a lot of Christmas music to be cloying and annoying. Many seasonal songs are best avoided if possible.

This absolute bop of a Christmas track is a comedic celebration of being annoyed at inescapable Christmas songs:

Skating on the River - Lily Frost

Do you listen to songs on repeat? Not just once or twice, but for hours? I don’t do this very often, but I did a marathon of Skating on the River in December… 2006, I think? I was nursing a massive crush on a friend and “skating on the river, your hand in mine” seeked a very romantic prospect. It’s possible I did actually hold hands with this person while skating along a scenic path through the woods. You’d think I’d remember one way or another, but she was a much better skater than me (she played hockey, this newsletter is CanCon) and any hand-holding would have been easy to interpret as friendly stabilization rather than flirting.

This is a challenge I’ve often encountered when trying to flirt with girls: how do I indicate romantic interest, short of directly propositioning someone? Friends can cuddle, hold hands, and tell each other they’re beautiful. Some friends even call each other girlfriends. You would think kissing would be unambiguous, but I present as counter-evidence a conversation with one of my first year roommates:

Jingle Bell Rock (Spanish version) - Flor de Toloache

I find most versions of Jingle Bell Rock pretty dull. Sure, the tune gets lodged in my head, but the lyrics are so contentless that it ends up sounding way too much like this unhinged parody. 

The Flor de Toloache version gets points for (code)-switching up the lyrics, which means you get to hear silly  intersentential switching between Spanish and English, like Giddy-up jingle horse, te toca trotar, and learn the extremely delightful verb cascabelear. I don’t think I caught examples of other types of code-switching in the lyrics, but correct me if I’m wrong!

Glittery - Kacey Musgraves (feat. Troye Sivan)

I like how this song describes positive but somewhat confusing romantic feelings. Every single kiss is like a gift to me but also you shake me up and turn me upside down just like a snow globe.

I’ve never felt that skilled at expressing my romantic feelings. I’m often caught tangle-tongued when partners sincerely say sweet things to me. “Thanks, yes, I… also think you are great” feels pretty weak.

Holiday - She & Him

I haven’t been an engineer for more than a year. Instead, I’m doing stuff that I believe is important in theory (encouraging young synthetic biologists to reflect on responsible science) but that, hour-to-hour, involves a lot of sending emails and espousing opinions I feel underqualified to defend.

I volunteered for this nonprofit before starting my job, and I was a really good volunteer! I used to wonder why I seemed to show more agency and dedication in my volunteer gigs than at my engineering job… Was I just kind of a bad employee? A bad engineer? More passionate about responsibility than robots? Now that I’m doing this work full-time, I think it’s more that I wasn’t previously paying The Costs of Reliability:

I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm [Yesking Remix] - Billie Holiday

An extremely toasty dub remix of another seasonal (though not particularly Christmas-related) classic.

I’m generally in the “off with my overcoat” camp; I just don’t seem to get cold very easily. Earlier this week, a friend was telling me that people can earn points with her if they have blankets lying around their living rooms. She thinks “own throw blankets” belongs on lists like Steps Every Girl Can Take to Get a Girl to Sleep Over along with more traditional entries like “stock up on contact solution”. This would not have occurred to me! Are girls often so cold that they would leave a house for lack of a blanket?

White Christmas - The Drifters

This is feels like a classic to me, probably because the albums my dad would put on heavy roation each December were things like Soul Christmas and A Christmas Gift to You. It's like the meme about what your favourite generation of pokémon games says about you (spoiler: it says in what year you were about 10 years old).

I have come across a lot of semi-amused anguish from people my age about our once-fashionable culture becoming classic, which is another word for old. ("Aw, I love Arcade Fire, my dad used to play them on family camping trips growing up!") Rather than anguish, I hope to cultivate a sort of curious bemusement as the culture leaves me behind, something like the mood of this almost decade-old review of Nicki Minaj's Beez in the Trap:

I remember hearing this song at the grocery store, piped over the PA. For a second I got a flash of what it must be like when you are on in years, disconnected from pop music, and the kids' newest thing sounds simply incomprehensible, alien. This is music?! "Beez in the Trap" is awesome. It is cool, swinging, ungenerous. But I imagine Roy Orbison at the grocery store, pushing his cart of pickles and Oreos, wondering, What the hell is this?! Any sufficiently advanced pop-music is indistinguishable from noise. One day the songs on the radio will no longer make any sense.

It's Lit - Friend of Friend

I can’t seem to track it down, but I remember reading an interview where Grimes said she tried to make the song California as “sonically obnoxious” as possible. I freely admit to enjoying a distastefully peppy pop single on occasion (samples from my “obnoxious” playlist: Pop It, The Magic Position) and It’s Lit fits the genre. It’s kind of stupid, but also very energetic and fun!

I get a specific joy from making kind of stupid things. One of my favourite creative feelings comes when I’m making something so ridiculous that it feels almost illicit. Like, why did no one stop me from being a sexy Long Furby for halloween? Because they couldn’t, hahaha! I was making that costume myself!

The joy of the stupid seems to be what animates the Stupid Shit That No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon, which has featured projects like ​Wienchimes (windchimes made out of hot dogs) and Shakie (a camera app that only takes pictures when the phone is vigorously shaken). I’ve been to a genuinely productive hackathon, but more often watched a confusing parade of students deliver rotely inspiring pitches about the growth potential of a shoddy app they built in a weekend. Why couldn’t we admit to ourselves that we’d just wanted to spend a few sleep-deprived days messing around with technology?